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Sound On Sound Masterclasses - 2016-2017

IN-DEPTH GUIDE

PART 1

Synchro Arts Revoice Pro (from hereon ‘RP’) is a unique stand‑alone program that, with familiarity, can be used with your DAW with almost plug-in‑like ease. You could think of RP as Vocalign on steroids! It allows you automatically to map not only the timing, but also the pitch and ‘energy’ characteristics of one vocal part onto others. You can also make manual adjustments to pitch, time and formant, and while other tools can do that there’s a crucial difference: any adjustments you make to the Guide (see Glossary box) can dynamically update the processing you’ve done already. An obvious application is the tightening of stacked vocal doubles or harmonies, but the same algorithms can be used to fake very convincing doubles and harmonies. When you dig a bit deeper, there’s potential for all sorts of creative manipulation of various instruments, not to mention the ability to make ADR sessions sound more natural. The only real ‘downside’ is the learning curve: while there’s instant gratification to be had via the presets, this is sophisticated software. Not only is there new terminology for new users to get their heads around, but the array of options and possible workflows can seem almost bewildering at times. To help you achieve the best results quickly and consistently, this short series will guide you step by step along that curve, helping you progress from RP virgin to power user.

PART 2

In part one, I took you through some Revoice Pro 3.2 basics: you should now be able to transfer audio between RP and your DAW, apply alignment and fake-double presets, and make simple tweaks to Doubler settings. This time, I’ll explore the pros and cons of DAW‑sync’ed playback, explain how to edit pitch, time and level manually, and discuss making tweaks to your APT Processes settings.

PART 3

Welcome to the third and final instalment of our Revoice Pro (RP) series. In the previous two articles, I took you through pretty much everything you need to know to manipulate the pitch, time and level of audio manually, how to apply the automatic doubling and alignment Processes, and some useful ways to organise and navigate your RP projects. So, hopefully, you’re already fairly proficient with RP, but there are more strings to RP’s bow than the simple aligning, doubling and pitch-correcting of vocals. In fact, it makes various less obvious possibilities, erm, possible, so this month I’ll consider a fewexamples.